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Tuesday, July 03, 2012

That's an improvement.

Indiana's public intoxication statute had been a little vague up until now, but a new one went into effect on the first of this month. Basically, the new law states that the police have to prove that the arrestee meets at least one of the following standards to be guilty of the crime of public intox:

12 comments:

The police, I have discerned, are quite often "alarmed" upon finding an example of public intoxication. Their testimony would then go like this: "I was alarmed to find that the defendant was intoxicated." Guilty as charged.

Likewise, the police taking notice of a public intoxicatee is often due to that person's creation of a breach of the peace.The officer will testify, "I noted the defendant creating a scene wherein he/she/it breached the peace."

Unless those terms get narrowly defined, the SWAT team busting into your back yard BBQ will get you convicted of public intoxication without any trouble.

"How does setting a standard of "breaching the peace" make it any less vague?"

Because before, you just had to be intoxicated, and in public to meet the standard of guilt.

Now you have to be intoxicated and doing something.

As one of the po-po at the linked article pointed out, there really isn't going to be much practical difference, since even under the old law you had to actually be doing something enough to make a cop wonder whether or not you'd been drinking in the first place, but it will prevent gratuitous charges for people being, say, driven home from a bar should their driver get pulled over. (As in the referenced case in the article...)

Re: Must be a danger to themselves or others: I've been trying to win that point to cops here in Texas, for years. Texas penal code code 49.04 says simply: "A person commits an offense if the person appears in a public place while intoxicated to the degree that the person may endanger the person or another." Yet many cops decide to only read the first 14 words of that law, and decide that "they've been drinking" qualifies as "intoxicated," too.

Reading the backstory on the Indianna law, it looks like it was high time to reaffirm some citizens' liberties again. Any day in which that is done is not a day poorly spent.